Now (continued B.) that we have an adequate notion of what is to be wished, let us try what is to be done! And my friend actually succeeded in constructing an ink-stand, in which, during the twelve years that have elapsed since this conversation, alas! I might almost say since his death, I have never been able, though I have put my wits on the stretch, to detect any thing wanting that an ink-stand could be rationally desired to possess; or even to imagine any addition, detraction, or change, for use or appearance, that I could desire, without involving a contradiction.

HERE! (methinks I hear the reader exclaim) Here's a meditation on a broom-stick with a vengeance! Now, in the first place, I am, and I do not care who knows it, no enemy to meditations on broom-sticks; and though Boyle had been the real author of the article so waggishly passed off for his on poor Lady Berkley ; and though that good man had written it in grave and good earnest, I am not certain that he would not have been employing his time as creditably to himself, and as profitably for a large class of readers, as the witty dean was while composing the Draper's Letters, though the Muses forbid that I should say the same of Mary Cooke's Petition, Hamilton's Bawn, or even the rhyming correspondence with Dr. Sheridan. In hazarding this confession, however, I beg leave to put in a provided always, that the said Meditation on Broom-stick, or aliud quidlibet ejusdem farinæ, shall be as truly a meditation as the broom-stick is verily a broom-stick-and that the name be not a misnomer of vanity, or fraudulently labelled on a mere compound of braindribble and printer's ink. For meditation, I presume, is that act of the mind, by which it seeks within either the law of the phenomena, which it had contemplated without (meditatio scientifica), or semblances, symbols, and analogies, corresponsive to the same (meditatio ethica). At all events, therefore, it implies thinking, and tends to make the reader think; and whatever does this, does what in the present over-excited state of society is most wanted, though perhaps least desired. Between the thinking of a Harvey or Quarles, and the thinking of a Bacon or a Fenelon, many are the degrees of difference, and many the differences in degree of depth and originality; but not such as to fill up the chasm in genere between thinking and no-thinking, or to render the discrimination difficult for a man of ordinary understanding,

not under the same* contagion of vanity as the writer. Besides, there are shallows for the full-grown, that are the maxims of safe depth for the younglings. There are truths, quite commonplace to you and me, that for the uninstructed many would be new and full of wonder, as the common daylight to the Lapland child at the re-ascension of its second summer. Thanks and honor in the highest to those stars of the first magnitude that shoot their beams downward, and while in their proper form they stir and invirtuate the sphere next below them, and natures preassimilated to their influence, yet call forth likewise, each after its own form or model, whatever is best in whatever is susceptible to each, even in the lowest. But, excepting these, I confess that I seldom look at Hervey's Meditations, or Quarles' Emblems,† without feeling that I would rather be the author of those books of the innocent pleasure, the purifying emotions, and genial awakenings of the humanity through the whole man, which those books have given to thousands and tens of thousands -than shine the brightest in the constellation of fame among the heroes and Dii minores of literature. But I have a better excuse, and if not a better, yet a less general motive, for this solemn trifling, as it will seem, and one that will, I trust, rescue my ideal of an inkstand from being doomed to the same slut's corner with the de tribus Capellis, or de umbra asini, by virtue of the process which it exemplifies; though I should not quarrel with the allotment, if its risible merits allowed it to keep com

*"Verily, to ask, what meaneth this? is no Herculean labor. And the reader languishes under the same vain-glory as his author, and hath laid his head on the other knee of Omphale, if he can mistake the thin vocables of incogitance for the consubstantial words which thought begetteth and goeth forth in."-Sir T. Brown, MSS.

+ A full collection, a Bibliotheca Specialis, of the books of emblems and symbols, of all sects and parties, moral, theological, or political, including those in the Centenaries and Jubilee volumes published by the Jesuit and other religious orders, is a desideratum in our library literature that would well employ the talents of our ingenious masters in wood-engraving, etching, and lithography, under the superintendence of a Dibdin, and not unworthy of royal and noble patronage, or the attention of a Longman and his compeers. Singly or jointly undertaken, it would do honor to these princely merchants in the service of the muses. What stores might not a Southey contribute as notes or interspersed prefaces? I could dream away an hour on the subject.

pany with the ideal immortalized by Rabelais in his disquisition inquisitory De Rebus optime abstergentibus.

Dared I mention the name of my Idealizer, a name dear to science, and consecrated by discoveries of far-extending utility, it would at least give a biographical interest to this trifling anecdote, and perhaps entitle me to claim for it a yet higher, as a trait in minimis, characteristic of a class of powerful and most beneficent intellects. For to the same process of thought we owe whatever instruments of power have been bestowed on mankind by science and genius; and only such deserve the name of inventions or discoveries. But even in those, which chance may seem to claim, "quæ homini obvenisse videantur potius quam homo venire in ea”-which come to us rather than we to them—this process will most often be found as the indispensable antecedent of the discovery-as the condition, without which the suggesting accident would have whispered to deaf ears, unnoticed; or, like the faces in the fire, or the landscapes made by damp on a whitewashed wall, noticed for their oddity alone. To the birth of the tree a prepared soil is as necessary as the falling seed. A Daniel was present; or the fatal characters in the banquet-hall of Belshazzar might have struck more terror, but would have been of no more import than the trail of a luminous worm. In the far greater number, indeed, of these asserted boons of chance, it is the accident that should be called the condition-and often not so much, but merely the occasion-while the proper cause of the invention is to be sought for in the co-existing state and previous habit of the observer's mind. I can not bring myself to account for respiration from the stimulus of the air, without ascribing to the specific stimulability of the lungs a yet more important part in the joint product. To how many myriads of individuals had not the rise and fall of the lid in a boiling kettle been familiar, an appearance daily and hourly in sight? But it was reserved for a mind that understood what was to be wished and knew what was wanted in order to its fulfilment for an armed eye, which meditation had made contemplative, an eye armed from within, with an instrument of higher powers than glasses can give, with the logic of method, the only true Organum Flevristicum which possesses the former and better half of knowledge in itself as the science of wise questioning,* and the other half in * "Prudens quæstio dimidium scientiæ," says our Verulam, the second

reversion,—it was reserved for the Marquis of Worcester to see and have given into his hands, from the alternation of expansion and vacuity, a power mightier than that of Vulcan and all his Cyclops a power that found its practical limit only where nature could supply no limit strong enough to confine it. For the genial spirit, that saw what it had been seeking, and saw because it sought, was it reserved in the dancing lid of a kettle or coffeeurn, to behold the future steam-engine, the Talus, with whom the Britomart of science is now gone forth to subdue and humanize the planet! When the bodily organ, steadying itself on some chance thing, imitates, as it were, the fixture of "the inward eye" on its ideal shapings, then it is that Nature not seldom reveals her close affinity with mind, with that more than man which is one and the same in all men, and from which

the soul receives

Reason and reason is her being !"

Par. Lost.

Then it is, that Nature, like an individual spirit or fellow-soul, seems to think and hold commune with us. If, in the present contempt of all mental analysis not contained in Locke, Hartley, or Condillac, it were safe to borrow from "scholastic lore" a technical term or two, for which I have not yet found any substitute equally convenient and serviceable, I should say, that at such moments Nature, as another subject veiled behind the visible object without us, solicits the intelligible object hid, and yet struggling beneath the subject within us, and like a helping Lucina, brings it forth for us into distinct consciousness and common light. Who has not tried to get hold of some half-remcmbered name, mislaid as it were in the memory, and yet felt to be there? And who has not experienced, how at length it seems given to us, as if some other unperceived had been employed in the same search? And what are the objects last spoken of, which are in the subject (i. e. the individual mind), yet not subjective, but of universal validity, no accidents of a particular mind resulting from its individual structure, no, nor even of the human mind, as a particular class or rank of intelligencies, but of imfounder of the science, and the first who on principle applied it to the ideas in nature, as his great compeer Plato had before done to the laws in the mind.

perishable subsistence; and though not things (i. e. shapes in outward space), yet equally independent of the beholder, and more than equally real-what, I say, are those but the names of nature? the nomina quasi vóvuɛvα, opposed by the wisest of the Greek schools to phænomena, as the intelligible correspondents or correlatives in the mind to the invisible supporters of the appearances in the world of the senses, the upholding powers that can not be seen, but the presence and actual being of which must be supposed-nay, will be supposed, in defiance of every attempt to the contrary by a crude materialism, so alien from humanity, that there does not exist a language on earth, in which it could be conveyed without a contradiction between the sense, and the words employed to express it!

Is this a mere random flight in etymology, hunting a bubble, and bringing back the film? I can not think so contemptuously of the attempt to fix and restore the true import of any word; but, in this instance, I should regard it as neither unprofitable, nor devoid of rational interest, were it only that the knowledge and reception of the import here given, as the etymon, or genuine sense of the word, would save Christianity from the reproach of containing a doctrine so repugnant to the best feelings of humanity, as is inculcated in the following passage, among a hundred others to the same purpose, in earlier, and in more recent works, sent forth by professed Christians. "Most of the men, who are now alive, or that have been living for many ages, are Jews, Heathens, or Mahometans, strangers and enemies to Christ, in whose name alone we can be saved. This consideration is extremely sad, when we remember how great an evil it is, that so many millions of sons and daughters are born to enter into the possession of devils to eternal ages."-Taylor's Holy Dying, p. 28. Even Sir T. Brown, while his heart is evidently wrestling with the dogma grounded on the trivial interpretation of the word, nevertheless receives it in this sense, and expresses most gloomy apprehensions "of the ends of those honest worthies and philosophers," who died before the birth of our Saviour: "It is hard," says he, "to place those souls in hell, whose worthy lives did teach us virtue on earth. How strange to them will sound the history of Adam, when they shall suffer for him they never heard of!" Yet he concludes by condemning the insolence of reason in daring to doubt or controvert the verity of the doctrine,